What's the advantage of having the server and data on some device other than the one I'm using to interact with it?
Mostly that many people have more than 1 computer these days: a small one that just about fits in the palm of their hand, and a larger one that stays in a room.
This means that most people are instantly operating within the realm of "distributed computing", and one of the fundamental approaches to that sort of thing is to allow one of the computers to both provide and accept data to/from the other.
Of course, if you have an application that will only ever be used on a single computing device, and whose data has no utility anywhere else, there's no need for the data to be able to move to/from a server. Such applications do exist, but so do many, many more where the ability to view and modify the data on different devices in different locations is desirable, even when there's just a single user involved.
For a recipe database, if you're thinking of something like a food logger, having the food database shared by all users instead of local to each user is what allows the data to already be there the first time you ever log that same food. If it has a barcode or simple description and anyone else has ever input the nutrition data associated with it, it's already available to you without every user having to input that data individually.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a backend software engineer so I'm biased.
- They might have less control over the algorithms deployed on client side vs them being on the server. In case of android apps it is a hassle to get the users to upgrade the app. - In case there is a bug in the data I can't easily see the shape of the data and debug faster.
Probably in this case developer might be ambitious and would be thinking about adding extra features to their stack which would be potentially easy if algorithms and data is under their control.
All replies focus on "service" or cloud-in-general is needed to implement sync between devices.
Why we don't have "own" sync-my-files as-service that can be connected to many apps?
I would prefer this one (in all incarnations - desktop/mobile/watch) to be just apps, but connected to something like "folder in dropbox" or "folder in gdrive" ...
My cloud my choice. Their program my data (here or in my cloud).
I know that it doesn't work in todays economy when everyone expects free in exchange for some invonvenience like ads/data-scraping by vendor.
That's the opposite of gp's question of: >no reason to ever leave my laptop [...] What's the advantage [...] data on some device other than the one I'm using to interact with it?
Gp was wondering why the data can't remain local to that device [i.e. laptop]. Proposing "choose-your-own-cloud-service" like DropBox and Google Drive contradicts that.
Thanks to all the spying/telemetry in most of those platforms once you use your privacy protecting app on them you lose the advantage of your data being self-hosted in the first place.
No a lot of people would use fitness trackers if you manually had to enter all the information.